To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [96]
Alonse, lighting his way, had not been especially helpful, although he gripped his employer’s arm once when he tripped, and twice waited, with resignation or patience, when various impediments made progress difficult. Alonse was the nearest thing Nicholas had to an automaton: that was why he had him. As time went on, Nicholas discovered that he was walking with a limp and tried to correct it. It was only his neck and arm which had stiffened.
The lamp at the stairhead was still lit, and so was the other, through the pend and over the door that led direct to his offices. The moon had come up: in its brightness, the wick flames burned ochre. The watchman came out, and answered his questions satisfactorily enough, his eyes curious. Alonse waited neutrally, lantern in hand, to learn which door he would choose.
He didn’t especially want Govaerts or the clerks to find him comatose in his room in the morning. He turned up the steps to the house and told the night staff and Alonse to go to bed. He waited until they had gone, and without taking a light, found his way to a sink and got rid of the rest of what he had drunk.
He hoped it was the rest. His clothes, still sodden from neck to feet despite the long walk, were now freezing as well, engendering spasms of shivering. The water at the Castle, as promised, had been warm, and it had been his own choice to jump into it fully dressed. It had provoked another blurred expression of irritation about his wife’s absence; but the girl they had got for him to bathe with instead was silly and eager and presented no more problems than he had ever met as an apprentice, full of ale and joyous lustfulness in the secret corners of Bruges.
Remembering that made it easy. His booth had no curtain, but he removed from his mind the smells of food and wine, the squeals, the laughter, the splashing of others. Nevertheless, however he turned the girl in her excitement, he couldn’t escape the spectacle of the King, swollen-faced in his watery lodge, his little Queen clutched soaked on his knee, her immobile face turned outwards to the scented steam and all that was happening within it. Her face was staring out still when the King lifted his red-pelted arm from the water, and whipped the hood curtain in front of them both.
All of them had felt hot enough then. But not now.
The new glass windows of the Ca’ Niccolò were brilliant with moonlight. Aiming for his own quarters, Nicholas found he had stopped by the room where his son slept. The door was a little ajar. By stepping softly up to the threshold, he could just distinguish the cot with the child’s head sunk dark on the pillow. It did not stir. He might have gone in, but heard a movement beyond, by the window, and realised that Mistress Clémence was there, and awake. He lifted a hand in apology, and drew the door closed as he left.
The door of his own room was shut, but he saw underneath the line of flickering gold from the fire he always kept there, warming the cushions, the bedlinen, the heavy soft bedrobe and towels. He thought of them, walking towards it. Then he saw the twelve inches of shadow, blocking the light.
He made to turn, but too late. The door opened, and Gelis stood there. ‘Come in, please,’ she said.
She didn’t know how many women Nicholas had. She knew, of course, that in the months before Jordan was born, he had methodically bedded every mistress of Simon’s, as a journeyman of the lower grade would, laboriously proving his theory that Simon was infertile. It had proved unnecessary after Jordan, his image, had been born, but he had presumably enjoyed it. In any case, she was quite sure that on this his return, he had found similar sources of pleasure. He had indicated that she was equally free, so long as she observed discretion.
She therefore remained dressed tonight, presenting no diaphanous silhouette to her husband, and adduced by the heaviness with which he stood surveying her that she had been right. But she had guessed that already by the effortful quality of his voice, speaking to the watchman